Thursday, May 4, 2017

FSB Persecution Forces Defender of Russia’s Indigenous Peoples to Seek Asylum in the US

Paul
Goble

Staunton, May 4 – As a result of FSB
persecution, Pavel Sulyandziga, one of the founders of the Association of the
Indigenous Numerically Small Peoples of Russia and vice president of the UN
working group on business and human rights, has been forced to request
political asylum in the United States.

Because Sulyandziga was a Yabloko
candidate for the Russian Duma in 2016, the fullest account of his plight is on
the Yabloko party website (yabloko.ru/publikatsii/2017/05/02).
So far, most other articles about his fate have simply drawn from that source.

An Udeg mathematics teacher,
Sulyandiga became politically active in Gorbachev’s time and in 1987 was elected
to the Soviet of Peoples Deputies and then in 1991 headed the National Council
of Peoples Deputies in Krasny Yar.In
the 1990s, he served as an advisor to the Primorsky kray governor on issues of the
indigenous peoples of the North.

In 2004, the activist formed the
Batani Foundation to support and defend indigenous peoples against threats from
the consequences of outside exploitation of oil, gas and other raw materials on
the territory of their homelands. In 2016, Moscow named the foundation “a
foreign agent,” but it did not give Sulyandiga any warning about this. He
learned it from the media.

Even before that Moscow action, regional
officials had attacked the foundation, accusing it of “political provocations”
and a desire to increase tensions between the indigenous peoples and
Russians.During the 2016 elections, the
media accused Sulyandiga of corruption and other crimes but provided no
evidence for these charges.

After the election, the authorities
arrested his brother and sought to force him to testify against his brother, an
indication, Sulyandiga says, that Moscow is planning a new political trial
against him.The powers that be have
also interviewed others and they’ve sent Sulyandiga’s son to a hot spot in the
North Caucasus.

“Fearing for his family,” Yabloko
says, “Pavel Sulyandziga decided to request political asylum in the US. He
publicly declared this last week. Now, he and his family are in the US and
awaiting the decision of the authorities there on providing him and his family
with political asylum.”

The ethnic activist says that he
intends to continue to fulfill his obligations as a member of the UN working group
on business and human rights, and the party website expresses the hope that he
will be allowed to do so.